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Comment by KK7NIL | Hacker News Reader

> is not readily accessible to objective/quantitative methods.

Just because the mind is not readily quantifiable with current technology doesn't mean that it's subjective "by nature".

> for instance qualia, whose existence is self-evident,

No, it isn't and I see no way to test for "qualia" so, applying Newton's flaming laser sword, it's not worthy of debate.

It's a very dangerous thing to draw conclusions about empirical phenomenon from metaphysics. I suggest you stick to the scientific method when trying to understand the empirical world, it has been far more successful than philosophical rambling.

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> No, it isn't and I see no way to test for "qualia"

You are verifying the existence of qualia every instant of your existence. It's the most immediately apparent empirical fact conceivable, since it is sensory experience itself, and you are testing its presence by the mere fact of being alive (philosophical zombies [0] notwithstanding).

> Before she left her room, she only knew the objective, physical basis of those subjective qualities, their causes and effects, and various relations of similarity and difference. She had no knowledge of the subjective qualities in themselves. [0]

I suggest you confirm the definitions and senses of terms you criticize before being so dismissive of them.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/#Irreducible

The experience of qualia doesn't define any test. By what metrics would we even test it against? Are qualia orderable in any way? Do they have weight, a size, or substance? Do processes of material 'exist' physically in any meaningful sense?

We have not devised a test for others' qualia, and the only evidence we have of qualia is our own experience, which is a model of objective reality and not reality itself.

Bringing up philosophical zombies: we can't know if everyone inhabits their own universe, independent of each other, filled with zombie replicas. From anyone's perspective: that scenario would be 100% indistinguishable from what Occom's razor suggests. It therefore follows the qualia do not exert any sort of physical presence.

There are nonphysical things that we consider to exist. Numbers being the prime example (har de har har). Numbers do not physically exist, but are a property we impose on various groups (of which we distinguish in our own mind). Similar processes like experience do not 'physically exist' but is a property of physical existence (of which, we politely assume of other people to possess, and not call them zombies).

This may be true, but what does it have to with psychology as a science? How psychology deals with meta cognition (thinking about thinking) is correlate it with objective measures related to the phenomenon, (performance accuracy, changes in BOLD response in task fMRI. We don't care if its qualia, or just reports of experience. that is a different debate and field entirely.

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